Printers have become commonplace in the home and workplace. Consequently, consumers have become familiar with replacing ink supplies or cartridges in printers while ink manufacturers have built high volume businesses of filling and shipping such cartridges. Despite the overwhelming success of these businesses, many challenges remain. For example, some ink supplies or cartridges may drool ink when transported to a significantly different altitude. In other contexts, pigment-based ink supplies or cartridges lose efficiency or effectiveness as precipitates form within the pigment-based ink, and then those precipitates partially clog a fluid interconnect to a printhead. Conventional attempts at overcoming such clogging include active mixing, avoiding pigment-based inks, or filtering. Each of these attempted solutions increases the cost and/or complexity of the ink supply or cartridge.
Moreover, a constant challenge remains to maximize the amount of ink within a supply or cartridge that is available for printing beyond the amount of ink that becomes effectively sacrificed to a capillary media used for creating negative pressures within the supply or cartridge.
Accordingly, designers of ink supplies still face many challenges in providing an ideal customer experience with replaceable ink supplies.